Chicago's Hispanic neighborhoods farther from nature, study shows

January 11, 2013

Moving to the city shouldn’t mean giving up nature. Studies have shown that people who spend more time in natural settings bounce back from stress faster and might even be healthier than those without access to parks and open spaces. In Chicago, however, some communities are closer to nature than others.

According to recent research out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, residents of Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods live farther from nature than residents of other neighborhoods.

“When you look at the patterns across all four variables,” said Amélie Davis, a postdoctoral research associate at UIC and lead author of the study, “you can see the low- to mid-income Hispanic tracts are further from Lake Michigan, further from open space, they have lower bird biodiversity, and they have the lowest percent canopy cover.”

That means they are also farther from the benefits those natural elements either indicate or provide directly — ecosystem services, to use the jargon. Canopy cover, for example, is more than aesthetic. Trees help regulate the local air quality, stormwater runoff and even noise pollution.

That socioeconomic disparities influence Chicagoans’ access to nature is not entirely surprising, given the city’s legacy of segregation. What was unexpected, Davis said, was that the statistical analysis found low-income, Hispanic neighborhoods fared significantly worse than low-income, African-American areas.

“We thought if there was an environmental injustice,” she said, “it would be for all of the groups or none. Not the same group consistently underserved.”

But Davis cautioned against assuming any ill-intent on the part of City Hall.

“It might be a concurrence of circumstance, and not pernicious,” she said. Industry squeezed out most of the natural spaces in Pilsen and Little Village before those neighborhoods became an important Hispanic enclave. When their notorious coal-fired power plants shut down last year, however, residents of the southwest side left no doubt about their aspirations for more green space.

And the study does not tell the whole story. Proximity to open space is not a perfect stand-in for access, to say nothing of the quality of that open space.

Davis’ research is funded by an Urban Long Term Research Area Exploratory grant from the National Science Foundation. The study was published in Ecosphere, a journal of the Ecological Society of America.